Show Notes
I enjoy recording podcast with all my guests but this one was particularly full of laughter, learning and insights. For the 11th episode of #TheElephantintheRoom I interviewed Professor Jonathan A.J. Wilson, a Professor of Brand Strategy & Culture at Regent's University London, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Islamic Marketing and the author of ‘Halal Branding’. Born and raised in Manchester, Professor Wilson is the son of a white Scottish father and Black Carribbean mother in a Christian household. He converted to Islam in 2000. He has deep knowledge of different cultures, speaks multiple languages with ease and is passionate about marketing and branding. In this episode he speaks about the absence of diversity in leadership positions in higher education 👇🏾
👉🏾 The lack of non-western mainstream examples in marketing.
👉🏾 Halal branding
👉🏾 Hip Hop counterculture and its role in inspiring social change and making ethno - racial issues mainstream
👉🏾 Cultural appropriation, White fragility
👉🏾 Acceptable stereotyping
👉🏾 The controversy around existing acronyms and categorisations of racial and ethnic groups
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Listen to the full episode here 👇🏾
https://player.captivate.fm/show/aa7beee1-226a-40c6-b451-67244be1412a/latest/
Memorable Passages from the episode
👉🏾 So I'm a chemistry graduate, I've got an MBA, and I've got two doctorates. One of them is in branding and the other one is in the ‘Halal phenomenon.’ Career wise, I've been a professional musician. I played at Glastonbury, on the BBC. And I wrote and performed some music for the first few Grand Theft Auto video games for all of you rebels out there. And also, as a schoolboy I played rugby for England, and I'm born and raised in Manchester and my folks work for the NHS.
👉🏾 Actually, I think I'm old enough now for my identities to be pretty fixed. But I am mindful of how I communicate my identity to others. So, depending on my audience, I try to refine it a little bit for the context. So, if you were to ask me, am I black or mixed race or Muslim, or an Arab or Asian in an African body. Am I a grunge kid? Am I a hip hop cat? I'm an afro punk. Am I an Afro Samurai? Or am I a professor? I'm all of these.
👉🏾 Revolution! Apart from revolution, because academics are not very good at being revolutionary because we like to read lots of articles and make incremental change and not challenge the status quo so much. We've done the monitoring and we've done the reporting. Some more proactive measures have to be taken beyond just the advertisements that say “we welcome applications from underrepresented communities such as black people, women” it's not really working. Because if it was, I wouldn't
read the same articles year in year out. Proactively ensure that there are enough minority professionals that are shortlisted, I'm not saying give them jobs, I'm saying give them a chance. And we should also be mindful of who is involved in the interviewing and selection. So, if there are people that can't pronounce people's names, right, and they don't have any kind of understanding or appreciation of those cultures and backgrounds, then that's also a problem too. For example, if your name is Ahmed or Osama or Mohammed or Khadija or Ayesha and you write about the Middle East, or you write about Islam, or Islamic finance or something like that, people might just assume that that's all that you know. That you don't know about cucumber sandwiches, eggs and chips, Manchester United, and things like that.
And so I find that those also percolate into recruitment and selection. And then even if we go across the board that you know, I hear stereotypes that, you know, if for example, you are from India or China, then you're better at quantitative research and mathematics. But, you know, if you are French, then you might be better at philosophy and culture and luxury branding and things like that. And if you're black, then you're a professor of urban culture, which translates to basically, you know, hip hop, fried chicken, grime, twerking.
👉🏾 Well! Put it this way if we were discussing, thought, creativity, excellence, and business practice in the context of women. And there was no representation, or there were no contributions from women, people would find it easier to see how wrong that was, how myopic and how fraught with howling gaps in understanding. However, when we discuss race and culture, it's a little bit more difficult for people to get it. If we think about race issues, it's a lot easier for people to assume that they can speak on behalf of communities. That's the thing that there's just a lack of richness, if we just hold on to this idea of a Western perspective of marketing, and it's easy to do, right, because the preponderance of literature comes out of North America and Europe. Most of the top business schools are coming from these regions. And most of our brightest diaspora go to these institutions and are taught these theories and models, right. And so even if you come out of these institutions, and you want to challenge the status quo. But you face a mountain of opposition, because you're suggesting that there could be an alternative. And within my own career I've had to wait a number of years of climbing up that mountain, just to be able to put forward the argument that things might be different or there are alternative ways of looking at things. This is why I'm fascinated by alternative perspectives that challenge the way that we think. It’s just the idea that we could enrich our understanding, through understanding alternative perspectives.
👉🏾 Branding draws from a lot of concepts and practices, which are actually rooted in religion and in particular Christianity. So, my contributions within the book that I wrote called Halal branding, and some of the papers that I've published, is to ask the question, what changes if you draw from another faith? You’ll be amazed at how brands want to be worshipped, they want you to hold them in higher esteem than anyone else, to devote your life to them, to lose your mind, and to be converted. I've
read articles where they talk about the holy grail in branding. We've been in meetings where people have said, ‘Let's all sing from the same hymn sheet’ or what have you. What if you don't sing hymns? Some of you might be saying, Ah, avatar is from Hinduism. You're right. But then let's look at what that's done to our understanding by using the term avatar. When somebody has an avatar on social media, we kind of know that that's not the full you. So that's the contribution of Hinduism in terms of social media branding, the avatars are things that we can choose. And we can have lots of them in the same way as there were many avatars of Vishnu, right. I am outlining how branding works for products that are catering for a Muslim audience, or audiences across the world, whether that's majority or minority communities, but also how Muslims can brand their products and services to anyone authentically with integrity. In the same way as brands like Starbucks or Costa have been able to go out there and say we're from this culture. And this drove us to create a brand like this and this is our story. I think the Muslims need a little bit of help in telling their story, especially now in the climate that we're in where people are kind of suspicious. I just wanted you to write a feel-good book. Because if you haven't seen the cover, it's shocking pink and electric blue. I wanted it to shatter some stereotypes that we're all about Moroccan tiles and mosque domes and the colour green and gold. That we have rich and diverse personalities. And I think it's been well received inside and outside the Muslim community.
👉🏾 Well, I think there's a lot to do with reporting what's happening on the street, in the form of zeitgeist. I think painting vivid pictures in people's minds, finding a way to make words attractive and flow, moving your mind, body and soul. Sometimes being quite base actually, and doing the opposite. Making the best use of what you've got on a budget because you couldn't get let into clubs, or you didn't have access to musical instruments, you couldn't afford expensive clothes so, you wore t shirt and trainers. I think rebellion, healthy competition and collaboration. Because what you see in hip hop is there are a lot more artists who would guest on each other's albums than say in other genres of music. But also I'd like to focus on the notion of cool, because actually, if you look at its linguistic origins. And I've read research on this, it originates from African slavery. And it's this idea of grace under pressure, and creating a mask to hide the oppressor from sensing defeat in you. And now that I've explained that, then you might get a sense of where hip hop is coming from. People might just think it's showing off or it's childishness, or that they don't understand the wearing of gold chains and or bling or any of those things. But you've got to look to the root of where this is coming from. This is coming from people being excluded, and wanting to show that they will not be defeated, and now nor excluded. Because if you look at some of the hip hop billionaires, whether that's Jay Z, Kanye, Dr. Dre, Beats by Dre headphones, Yeezy trainers. That's hip hop's contribution in saying well, we actually came up with an alternative, creative art form, lifestyle and business model, which is mainstream.
👉🏾 So, it's tricky and very nuanced. And we can all be guilty of it right? You don't know that you're guilty of it until you step outside of your bubble, go to another country, talk to other people, and then you realise that you have. So ultimately, to avoid it, you have to pay your dues, and ensure that people who have inspired you are respected, credited. And the people that you draw from and target are acknowledged and respected and elevated. If you can get that ratification, then you're going to avoid appropriation. But sadly, many people aren't able to do that. There's been a number of articles, quite rightly pointing out that black youth culture in America is being plundered for these, nuggets of cool that then get turned into advertising campaigns. It was this year that John Boyega spoke about the fact that he was creative director for an advert for john Malone. But when they used it in China they kept his idea but he and all of the all of the actors and actresses were replaced by an all Chinese cast. Now some people might say, okay, what's wrong with that? The cater, that's localised marketing, a catering for Chinese audience, but he wasn't credited. And John Boyega is a global superstar. If you're still thinking, yeah, but maybe, you know, he's being a bit paranoid. So why was he his presence reduced in Star Wars posters marketed in China? The black guy, right, you know, he will provide a ton of evidence as to why he thinks that way. And I think it's very compelling evidence. So, appropriation is easy. I think that some of the debates on appropriation, appreciation are, are rooted in how much power you have. And so, appropriation doesn't appear to be much of a problem
if you are from a disenfranchised or minority community who is powerless. But if you have power and you can wield that power and influence and you are disproportionately benefiting from basically the blood, sweat and tears and the backs of other communities, that's when people smell appropriation.
👉🏾 So, porcelain, white fragility another picture that I wanted to paint. It was to highlight just this obsession with perfection, the aesthetic of lightness, how fragile and breakable emotions were in a certain context, and how therefore people thought that they need to be protected. And ultimately, it is this phenomenon of people being offended, by those who've been oppressed, wronged or discriminated. It’s a reaction and, this reaction tends to be against people with the darkest skin or darker skin. That's for socio cultural reasons, right? But also, I want to make the point that, you know, colourism isn't unique to white people. So, we could be discussing Asian matrimonial websites, and how they classify people according to how dark they are, whether you are, wheatish, olive skinned, mediterranean and how that also affects your marketability with regards finding a future spouse, right? I'm really wanting to talk about that because I think that it's toxic. And that's one of the challenges that we face and that also extends to, like, you know, when you've got movements, like Black Lives Matter, and then people reply with, don't all lives matter.This fragility means that the door gets closed, or the real casualty is not being acknowledged. So it's also this response where if a person of colour expresses their unhappiness the door gets shut straight away. And say, I don't see what that has to do with me or I had nothing to do with slavery, or, you know, I feel hurt by this. And, you know, one of my friends is black, and he says that he's never experienced racism. It’s describing that, you know, horrible closing of the door.
👉🏾 Well, let's be honest, marketers, advertisers, PR professionals day in day out stereotype. So, I don't think it's wrong. Now, you might think, look, I would say that, you know, that we don't call it stereotyping. We call it an audience segmentation. But audience segmentation is pretty much acceptable stereotyping, right. And I think it's a necessary function of doing business and targeting audiences. Because we have limited resources. At some stage, you know, I mean, I remember there was one, I had interest from one client, and I said, like, they were coming up with a new platform online. And I said, Who's your target audience? And they said, mankind. And I said, how much budget have you got to target mankind? Because it's gonna be be expensive their thinking was no, no, no, we don't want to discriminate. We don't want to exclude
you. I was like, I get it, I totally get it, So we have to draw up a list of criteria, geographic demographic, psychographic, behavioural, that create these homogenous groups that we can then chase. And that's based upon some inductive and deductive thinking. But, effectively that's stereotyping.
👉🏾 Because if we set it like that, then nobody wants to do it, but it wasn't. What stereotype is that we call is segmentation but we're pretty much doing that. Like, even if, even if we're trying to do the good, the good fight, and we talk about the experiences of BME or BAME or whoever. This is stereotype. But we have to be careful of that stereotype. This is the challenge, because then you might have one community that says, hey, you're not speaking on our behalf. And then we go, Oh, you're right. But then there'll be someone else that says, oh, but proportionally, you are a fraction,
you're a minority within a minority, and we'd have the budget to cater for you. But we can't say that because obviously they get upset, right? I can get how people would be upset. Just even as a community, this assumption that all minorities are, are poor, from broken home socially deprived, things like that. That's not good. There are assumptions made about people in the workplace, where effectively you have no chance of moving onwards and upwards.
👉🏾 There is an overlap or there should be an overlap. Let me put it this way, the reality is that when we look at some of those things, they're not always overlapping. Brands might think that they are also their purpose and perceptions and value and image and everything that needs to be sufficient overlap to have that sweet spot where all of those things work together. But some of them might be adrift. And that's why you need to check on those things. I mean, most common example, you know, somebody can think that they're God's gift, right? But if everyone else doesn't, what value does that give to you? And so I would apply the same reasoning to a brand. So, doesn't matter what your mission statement is, what you say in your adverts, if it's not received well by your audience and they don't put their hands in the pocket, then there's a drift and you need to account where that drift is.
👉🏾 I mentioned before, whether that's BAME Black, Asian minority, ethnic BME, black, minority, ethnic BIPOC, black, indigenous person of colour think, to be honest, it's a mess. And globalisation hasn't made it any easier because now that we're communicating across continents, we're looking for a universally understood term. For example, things also come in and out of fashion. So at the minute the word black, let's call it fashionable or acceptable. People talk about being a black person and not a coloured person. And we could see recently what happens, you know, in the FA when, you know, someones’ referred to as being coloured. People took offence.
Mixed race is another term that I hate, but I use because you kind of have no choice, because even this notion of race I have problems with because this idea of mixed race and there's always that that cheesy meme that says there's only one race, which is the human race, is cheesy, but it's true. And so to me, the concept of race means it's almost like you're assuming that we're different species.
👉🏾 That’s what racism is. And that leads to problems. And so, the whole field is a mess because the more you look at it, the more you realise that some of these things are kind of contradictory or paradoxical. I'm politically black and I'm quite happy to tick a box saying I'm a black person. I'm also a mixed-race person. But even the term
black I have problems with because it doesn't link you to a geographic location. So if you're Asian, you're linked to a geographic location and you have heritage and culture and civilisation and all of those things. If you're a black person, then you're basically just drifting like any black person. You could be in Africa, could be in Australia, Aborigine, could be in Brazil. It's just purely descriptive by the colour of your skin. But I kind of feel like we have no choice. So then if we look at whether it's BAME and people are now getting offended by BAME but if we look, BAME was supposed to be the solution...
